AP is reporting, via Yahoo, that NEC Corp. said Tuesday its profit in the April-June period more than tripled, helped by turnaround efforts in its overseas mobile phone operations. Profit at the Tokyo-based electronics manufacturer totalled 973 million yen (US$8.2 million) for the three months ended June 30, up dramatically from 261 million yen the same period the previous year.
NextWave Wireless announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire all shares of IPMobile held by Mori Trust Co., Ltd., of Japan. Upon closing of the transaction, NextWave will hold a 69.2% stake in IPMobile. The agreement is subject to required government approvals. IPMobile has been working with IPWireless towards a commercial launch of a TD-CDMA wireless broadband network by November of this year. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Zentek announced a strategic partnership with UDcast to provide the Japanese and Far East Asia markets with DVB-H enabled products. Zentek will act as the reseller and integrator for in these markets to bring the tools for Japanese manufacturers and Asian operators. In Japan, the equipment provided by UDcast and Zentek will enable manufacturers to develop and produce mobile phones, notebooks, chipsets, in-car TV receivers and other devices compatible with DVB-H technology.
The USPTO has awarded NEC a patent on their technology for smart file downloads. The technology has been designed for phones with built-in wifi radios – allowing them to connect to any wireless access point. The idea is to have the phone decide, on its own, whether to download a file over-the-air via cellular networks or through a wifi network wireless access point.
Nuance Communications and Time Warner announced yesterday they have signed a definitive agreement whereby Nuance will acquire Tegic Communications a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL and a developer of embedded software for mobile devices. Tegic brings industry-leading T9 predictive text input software, which has shipped on more than 2.5 billion devices, and next-generation integrated text and touch input solutions to Nuance’s portfolio of voice-enabled applications for device control, mobile search, email and text messaging.
Kyocera Wireless has announced a free firmware update for its KR1 Mobile Router to support a variety of EV-DO Rev.A devices. The KR1 Mobile Router is a universal accessory that is compatible with most EV-DO PCMCIA cards, ExpressCards as well as USB-enabled devices and EV-DO handsets.
